Gregory Artzt, Founder and Chief Strategy Officer, General Sentiment, comes from a mathematical and systems background -- a good thing, because his company is in the business of gathering, processing, analyzing and framing results from big social media datasets. General Sentiment taps the growth of user-generated content and evaluates it with market research principles. In my interview with him, Gregory discusses the future trend in social media, the importance of "Likes" as part of the measurement arsenal, Business Intelligence platforms, Set-Top-Box Data and ROI. He also looks ahead to some important predictions on social media and the industry at large.

On December 31, 2013, the last of the Baby Boomers will turn 50 years old, and the most significant generational cohort in history will graduate from the 18-49 TV ratings category: the demographic group usually referred to by television journalists as "highly prized" or "most coveted." With the Boomers moving into a new demographic, isn't it time for reporters to stop fixating on 18- to 49-year-olds?

You know what they say about the best-laid plans: more often than not, they don't really get you anywhere. That was the lesson of last week's top media news. On the one hand, you had the demise of Canoe Ventures, whose plans couldn't have been better laid by its big corporate sponsors. And on the other, the totally unanticipated, stunningly meteoric rise to NBA stardom of an undrafted Harvard grad named Jeremy Lin. How's that for a contrast?

What a long, strange trip "Glee" is turning out to be. I can't think of another show anywhere else on television that can so deeply engage me in one moment and so thoroughly exasperate me in the next.

Recent columns have examined commercials from several aspects: avoidance, retention, engagement and measurement. Rounding out this discussion is this week's column on various commercial indices. In fact, the three metrics described below are from four different measurement companies and they highlight the challenge we have in standardizing terms and definitions for use in STB data measurement. Which should be the preferred metric for industry use - the Commercial Rating Index (from TRA), the Commercial Tuning Index (from Nielsen) or the Commercial Viewership index (from Kantar and TiVo)?

Last week's Cross-Platform Video Measurement Summit not only addressed new advancements in cross-platform measurement, it also provided an update on the state of return path data. For those of us who have been grappling with how to best measure content in the world of Big Data, it was an opportunity to have some of the best minds in the business present their vision of the digital future.

Who could have imagined one week ago that CBS' telecast last Sunday of the 54th Annual Grammy Awards would be so historic and so highly rated for so sad and terrible a reason? The sudden death of Whitney Houston the night before resonated throughout, adding a genuine emotional undercurrent to an event that is often as distant and hollow as most Hollywood award shows.

Continuing on the commercial pod theme from the past weeks, let us now consider the common elements associated with pods. These constants help in the measurement of commercials within the pods and the measurement of full pods within a program or piece of content.

At a time when there are more televisions than people in the United States, one of the loneliest things you can do is watch TV. There was a time, long ago and far away, when the entire family would gather around the communal television to tune in "The Beverly Hillbillies." But now, with TV sets in almost every room, people today generally watch TV alone. There is, however, an antidote to the feelings of anomie that sometimes arise from the solitary TV experience: live-tweeting. This is the practice of using Twitter to comment on events in real time while simultaneously …

I know, I know. By now Super Bowl XLVI -- the game and the commercials -- has long since lost its novelty as water-cooler fodder. However, being a huge aficionado not only of televised sports, but also of the advertising that drives the business, I feel compelled to weigh in on what I consider to be the best Super Bowl ads of 2012, and how they compared on my personal scale of advertising success: The ROI Meter. ROI is one key metric that all the other rankings of TV commercials are now only just managing to capture. Here they are, …